The IT team building the systems supporting the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have a lot of work to do in the next two years, as CERN prepares for the next big batch of experiments in 2015. When they need to, each of the site’s four particle detector hubs – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb – take what amounts to 40 million pictures a second, producing 40 petabytes of information. Whilst not all of that information is kept – much of it related to already understood physics rather than interesting new particles – there is still 25GB a second that has to be thrown on standard discs and tapes. That’s real Big Data.
